Codename: Airbags

Sailing has come a long way very quickly, we (Russ) started from scratch again, but with a better understanding of how we wanted the game to feel and the features we wanted to build in. With all our foundation work on Hydronautics it became the first puzzle to be brought on using all the prior work we had put in.  There were growing pains, and a lot of deep discussions about what should be done within each individual puzzle and what should be done in a universal code block. It can seem straightforward, rating each puzzle by a scoring rubric. In reality, none of them play the same way, so scoring and rating how skill is measured can be tricky! This brings to mind how important it will be for all of you to let us know what is working for you and what is holding you back. As we develop variations on the puzzles, it`ll be the best way to guide our design process. While it’s unrealistic to expect everyone to love at least one variant of each puzzle, the goal is to make it so you d...

  Ahoy all you salty sky-raiders! As the spring weather rolls in we are drenching ourselves in our work. Recovered from sickness and back on track we are pushing to get the first puzzle into your awaiting hands. My baby, Hydronautics (formerly bilge) is coming along and we are in the process of finishing it to be packed up and ready for deployment. Soon you`ll be able to get your hands wet with our first puzzle, which we’re aiming to follow up shortly with the others. Our initial work is vital to the process, so we`ve spent a lot of time making sure the backbones for the interface, game management, and effects will work across multiple games.  Before we plunge into the depths of the full release we`ll be putting out all the individual puzzle games to play, getting player feedback, trying some experiments, and fixing bugs. We will be releasing a more detailed dive into Hydronautics with a video shortly (once I finish editing it...again). But I`d like to take a little of your ti...

  There’s Something in the Air It’s germs.       We’ve both caught something this last week and have been lucky to scrape together two brain cells between us. B ut we’re coming out the other side, cleaning the house, and even knocking a few things off our game dev list between coughing and sneezing.      Just take a look at how much has changed in the game!                                              Before After      Yeah, all the things we completed were more ‘under-the-hood’ than visually significant. We’ve built up the sign-in system, embedded some basic analytics, started our save-game system, and added code comments!      Sometimes, it’s the little things.      Another thing that was supposed to happen over t...

  Made of Bricks Greetings fellow raiders! A Message from Lead Developer Russ: As we mentioned in the last post, the past two weeks have been focused on migration to Unity 6. One of the things we knew going into this was that our framework thus far had been pieced together in a “get it working, fix it later” fashion- and that wasn’t going to be sustainable moving forward. With that in mind, we made the decision to build a solid foundation that is robust, flexible, easier to build on top of, and will better suit our needs moving forward. This was one of those choices where the only downside is the time it would take to create.  And now here we are, knee deep in getting everything laid out properly. Prior to this, we would see problems come up and just find a band-aid solution so we could push forward. Now we have a better knowledge of how to avoid many of those issues through better planning and execution. It’s been amazing to have the time and space to properly nail down and r...

 Ahoy all you sky-bound buccaneers!      A big target of ours is variety in our games and making more than one way to play and be good at any task. While games like hydronautics , carpentry, and sailing have enough room for a variety of styles, ones like gunnery and sword-fighting are harder to reimagine. Sword-fighting is particularly difficult as it involves multi-player.  We had a bit of a brainstorming session back at PAX and we're putting together a new Sword-fighting variation- this one will be a rhythm game! Rhythm games are a great break from regular puzzling and should be an excellent match for sword-fighting. They can be exhausting to play for a long period of time, but sword-fighting has a shorter play and it can increase in speed for increasing challenges.  Right now we are looking at using some key parts of the rhythm game WACCA. The circular zone makes for an excellent play area that should be great for a mouse, touch, or controller. The c...

  Ahoy, all you sky raiders! New logo!  We are officially a full-time game company! It took a little longer than we wanted, but for this year we'll just be working for ourselves, and trying to keep ourselves from going insane. I've been full-time for a few weeks now and have already been working on re-hashing the bilge game, and Russ' last day at his old job was last week- so now we're both full-time game developers! Honestly, we're both excited and anxious, but trying to focus on the excitement. I'll be trying to keep you all as up-to-date as possible, though if the choice is between finishing some game programming or posting an update or video, I'll land on the game programming. Speaking of programming- over the holidays I started building the bilge from scratch. The original had some good points, but there were some deep-rooted bugs and design issues that I wanted to address. I'm already two thousand lines of code deep and have addressed multiple ...